Chris Kernaghan

StephanieMarley · ‎2024 Mar 01

Hillsborough, County Down, Ireland
SAP Mentor since 2011

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In Chris's own word 😀

If you met me, the last thing you would guess that I am is a highly technical guy. In fact, being an active and well-known member of the SAP ecosystem, has also earned me a nomination as an SAP mentor. The SAP Mentor program brings together the top contributors and influencers of the SAP Community (a community with over 3 million members) and provides them access to SAP executives, exclusive events and a fantastic peer network of subject matter experts.

My personality is larger than life and people tend to know when I enter the room. My projects range from large multimillion transformational projects through to proof of concept. However, my real passion is the smaller proof of concept. I love being able to put the proverbial camel, in technology terms, through the eye of a needle. Currently I am focusing my love of SAP on cloud and DevOps to help my customers (and wider ecosystem) to deploy and operate landscapes more effectively. (Of course, and with greater efficiency) It is not unusual to find me working within a multi-platform/technology team and my role to bridge the gaps between all the different technologies to give the customer something which works and they can operate.

My passion to share my knowledge with others and learn from them has earned me many speaking engagements at conferences, the role of panelist on subject matter expert panels, and requests for my input by the trade media. I regularly co-host a weekly podcast called TechForGood talking about the weeks stories about how Technology is being leveraged for good. Come and let's have an interesting conversation - find me on Twitter @boobboo

Topics of interest: Basis, Cloud, Automation, Technology, Community, Generative AI

Chris, what inspired you to become an SAP Mentor?

I went to TechED Las Vegas around 2011, I went to the Innojam and met people like Leo, Thorsten, Phil Loewen, Craig and Dennis Howlett. These people just blew my mind on how smart and switched on they were within the ecosystem, IaC Cloud was getting started and I knew I wanted to be part of this group and in the area of Cloud. So I worked hard, learning, blogging and being part of the ecosystem influencing SAP and AWS - over time I interacted with the community more and more, talking to more people, giving advice and helping people. It was great, I really enjoyed it and it is true that you should be friends with people who support you to be the best version of yourself - the community and the Mentors encouraged and continue to encourage this in me.

What advice would like to share with other SAP community members?

298874_collaborate_blue (1).png Community lives and dies with people, if you want to be part of the community then you have to contribute to it - it does not need to be an overt act of creation, but you should read things that people have done, comment on them and show support of the work of others. Also everyone has a contribution to make, everyone has a voice and an opinion - make sure you use yours to shape things.